Suggestion for Developers of all Plugins

One thing I'm noticing while trying to get new clients and implementing various plugins are all of the CSS problems with regard to color and theme incompatibility. Nearly every client either has or wants a Premium theme which is ok as the majority of these themes have easy to set color to customize and match clients company colors. What is very hard and time consuming is that the majority of the plugins don't work properly with any of these themes without a lot of time customizing the CSS.
Since there are so many developers out there with their own style of writing code and naming conventions that just ad's more time figuring things out. Which sometimes is great as then I learn more and get to meet many great people via the forums here.

I'd suggest if possible that we figure out a way to have a module or whatever we want to call it here (much like many themes out there are implementing in the themes setup area) a Plugin Setup Section that would include the ability to customize color for things like Text, text Background, Box Background, shading, border, table or grid lines etc...

Hopefully I can get a bunch of +1s here as I think that this would be of great benefit to everyone as well as reduce a bunch of questions on how to change the colors or why plugins don't show up properly.

Thanks for the quick response @aecnu this is something I've seen become common place in a lot of themes lately so I'm assuming since the settings panel is nearly identical in several themes they must be using the same or similar code for the customization feature of the themes.

I heard that your vacation was great and you were going to post some photos but I never got the link!

Hey Joe, looks like you had the well deserved vacation you needed. Also great that you were able to spend it with your son as well. Thanks for sharing the photos, it's always nice to see other parts of the world.

This is the hardest thing about developing plugins. For normal people, all they are about are the looks of something, but looks are specific to themes. When we code plugins they have to be somehow made to work in any of tens of thousands of themes. That's impossible to do really, the best we can do is include some generic css that hopefully won't conflict too much with theme css.

@Aaron Thanks for the reply and explanation. For some reason I was under the impression that wordpress had a set of standards for themes, plugins etc... so that it made it easier to create working programs that would be compatible. I guess it was in that thinking that when wordpress was installed all if not the majority of the hooks and calls etc... were of standard protocol. Thanks for the heads up and great explanation.

That is what makes it so hard for us to mesh with Themes as there really is no standard for hooks etc. as demonstrated by many themes. But even if there were it would probably be a bear to get most theme developers to follow suit.

Aaron said it best with:

all they are about are the looks of something, but looks are specific to themes

But what he did not include was that is the same exact thing the theme designers have in mind, they only care about the looks and who cares about the hooks because that is what people are going to buy their theme over - exclusively looks.

How many people when purchasing a theme ask the developer/author have you included hooks etc.????

@MTB1701 I am originally from Pennsylvania and I left the US permanently in 2004 to live in Eastern Europe probably for the rest of my days which there are a lots more to come ... lol

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